Assessing Fungal Decay of Wood by Small-scale Toughness Tests

Abstract:

Impact bending and breaking radius were used to measure loss in toughness caused by basidiomycetes isolated from wood. Small test pieces were used to accelerate testing. Wide differences were found among, and sometimes within, the 26 species tested. Brown-rot fungi tended to cause greater losses than white-rot fungi, but no consistent difference was found between monokaryons and dikaryons of the same species.